Everyone Here

In her debut collection, Iddings presents poems that obsess over each word's sound and meaning(s), but rather than lament the imprecision of language, she extracts new definitions through play. Her speaker's subconscious zigzags from loneliness and love, to sex and the body, and to monsters and pop culture%E2%80%94sometimes within a single poem. Iddings references objects as disparate as iPods, clitorises, and the Blob coalesce in the speaker's swirling mind. A 22-page poem, "Liked it," forms the collection's core, adding emotional depth to a landscape that feels like a full floor of tenants' voices echoing through the hallway. Her images haunt%E2%80%94"My mother's dead boyfriend/ Tattooed on your shoulders/ The island a prison the explorers/ Stinking with scurvy she's owed/ A life she can't collect"%E2%80%94and she even mixes in highbrow literary humor: "Dickinson is no John Donne/ and John Donne no Shakespeare,/ and who knows really who he was?" Like Whitman and his many disciples, Iddings champions the communal voice ("Our name-tagged Self/ Our Loudest Voice our/ Love fucking us together") in a collection that's consistently surprising and light on its feet; a delight for any reader who has learned to love the sound of the voices in their own head. (Aug.)